Knowledge Waste | Glossary

Knowledge waste is referred to either lost opportunities to learn or learning less than we could have from a situation. Allen Ward a lean development expert divides knowledge waste into 3 categories scatter, hand-off and wishful thinking.

Scatter happens when anything breaks the flow of work. At project level, scatter occurs when the team is interrupted, when it is asked to stop what it’s doing and work on a different feature, when a person is added to or removed from the team, or when the team is harassed for updates on its progress toward an urgent task. Barriers to communication and poor tools are two main causes to scatter. Hand-offs is defined as a separation of knowledge, responsibility, action and feedback. In traditional way of development, hand-offs occurs at every phase. Wishful thinking refers here to making decisions without adequate information to support those decisions. Late projects are the most obvious results of wishful thinking. Continuous improvement is part of Scrum, failing to learn, and wasting the knowledge gained are serious deficiencies.

Further Reading:Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn